STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

ANNEX 2 - SECTION C:
POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL RECOGNITION
115
Street Artists in Europe
Contribution from the Centre de Recherche sur la Culture, les Musées et la Diffusion des savoirs
(CRCMD – Laetitia Di Gioia under the supervision of Serge Chaumier) – January 2007 – as part
of the study on ‘Street Artists in Europe’.
1. The concept of cultural policy
1.1. The problem of definition
The idea of a public policy on culture is a recent one and raises some difficulties relating, firstly,
to the ‘cumulative concept offered by the anthropological approach (…), and the ambiguity of
the concept itself’ 136 ; which makes it ‘difficult to define and demarcate the actual domain that
public action should cover’ 137 Secondly, culture as an object of policy comes up against the
problem of legitimacy in regard to the social actors involved, unlike education or health. In fact,
‘the question of the autonomy of artistic and cultural creation was in part directed against the
state 138 .’ Its protection then leads to circumscribing the establishment of a cultural policy. We
must therefore on the one hand identify the processes for legitimising a policy within a State
and, on the other, note the extent to which the Culture/State relationship may vary among
European countries.
In his article ‘Approches politistes des politiques culturelles’, Ioana Popa points to the need to
place forms of public action in a historical context. In his view, ‘the genesis of cultural policies
cannot be confined to the origins of the various forms of support given to arts and culture by the
public authorities but also consists in integrating and institutionalising the various forms of
intervention […]. Those processes are only possible, however, in the context of specific
historical and national conditions.’ Public intervention and institutionalisation encouraged by a
particular historical context then seem to be the determining criteria for the legitimacy of a
cultural policy: ‘the State thus becomes the real point at which culture is defined (Dubois,
1999), occupying an increasingly important position, through the distribution of State aid, in the
process of cultural legitimation and authentication 139 .’ This supplants ‘the monopoly previously
held by intellectuals and artists 140 .’
Moreover, ‘cultural policy is not the result only of a variety of State intervention practices but
also of the intellectual processes and specific methods used to legitimise those practices.’ 141 In
France, for example, although the creation of the autonomous Ministry of Cultural Affairs in
1959 was due mainly to a desire for cultural democratisation, that kind of legitimation was
transformed into the idea of a cultural democracy ‘seen, for its part, both as the recognition and
the development of cultural diversity (regional, community, ethnic, and so forth) and as a
challenge to traditional cultural hierarchies (e.g. ranging from ‘legitimate’ to ‘minor’ arts),
henceforth regarded as the reflection of social hierarchies’ 142 . Consequently, ‘public intervention
136 Popa, Ioana, Approches politistes des politiques culturelles, CNRS, Institut des sciences sociales du politique,
p. 1, proposed article for the site of the Observatoire des mutations des industries culturelles http://observatoireomic.org.
137 Ibid.
138 Ibid.
139 Ibid.
140 Ibid.
141 Ibid.
142 Ibid.
PE 375.307